LITERARY FEMINISMS provides a map for charting the difficult waters that feminist theories have created in literary studies. Ruth Robbins shows the reasons for the development of feminist literary critiques, explains the difficulties and explores some of feminism's blindspots. A wide range of theorists is discussed, from Wollstonecraft to Kristeva, showing the ways in which materialist, psychoanalytic and literary accounts of feminist thinking creatively intersect. Through a series of exemplary readings of texts such as Wilde's THE PICTURE OF DORAIN GRAY and Gilman's THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER she also points out how the student reader can begin to make her, or his, own feminist criticism, and can learn to engage with both the politics and poetics of the literature.